In my previous column on cleft sentences, I used the example sentence “Didn’t Diane use to be your boss?” I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I got a comment on the post and a direct message on Twitter asking if this was an error and if it shouldn’t be Didn’t Diane […]Can't access … [Read more...]

As if mornings weren’t difficult enough, English has evolved to give us four tricky little verbs to describe the first thing you do each day: wake, waken, awake, and awaken. And the problems go all the way back to Old English. According to Merriam-Webster, Old English had two similar verbs that … [Read more...]

One of the copy editor's jobs is to help writers avoid wordiness and redundancy. One place to focus on this issue is in verb choice. Too often, writers will fall back on a verb–article–direct object structure when a single verb will suffice. What's more, the three-word phrase weakens what should be … [Read more...]

Do you see something wrong with this sentence?
I started my research into the history of dumpster diving by googling “human scavengers.”
From the title of this post, you probably gather that I want to draw your attention to the word googling. You might not see any problems with that example … [Read more...]

In response to one of my older blog posts, “Punctuation Point: The Direct Address Comma,”* a reader asked me to expand on the direct address comma. Could the comma alter meaning? He offered these sentences: Look, Daddy! and Look Daddy!
The first, he thought, seemed to introduce a pause that gave … [Read more...]

We continue our quest for better verbs this week by looking at smothered verbs, a term I recently learned from Lisa McLendon at the Bremner Editing Center. Although the phrase was new to me, the concept certainly was not.
A smothered verb is a verb-noun combination — often with a preposition or … [Read more...]

Last week, I wrote about one semantic snare to watch out for in your search for better verbs — namely, making sure that verbs aren't "started" if they are completed as soon as they begin. This week, we continue our quest for active, immediate, and interesting verbs by looking at a problem that is … [Read more...]

Kurt Vonnegut's first rule for creative writing* is this: "Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted." This rule comes into play while crafting the story arc, deciding what level of detail to include, and discussing more philosophically the … [Read more...]